{ 2009.02.18 } Carl Steadman opened my eyes to the possibility of narrative in new media with two pieces: Two Solitudes (1995), in which you would eavesdrop by email on a conversation between two lovers?, friends? becoming distant, over 30 days, and 99 Secrets which I first encountered in 2000.

You can read Two Solitudes online, though without the slow delivery and intimacy of the inbox, it loses much of its poignancy and involvement.

99 Secrets has similarly decayed. 99secrets.com, where you could click through 99 short snippets of conversation between an anonymous he and she, has been snagged by a domain squatter and is consequently no longer available in the Wayback Machine. (I've attempted to buy the domain to enable access to the cache again, but haven't had a response to my emails.) It's sad.

Recently I found miss bunnyhead darling kept the 99 secrets and posted them back in 2006. I am super, super grateful. As ephemeral as the secrets maybe should be, I think they still deserve an audience.

What I've done is taken that list - which I'm not going to link to directly here - and I'm posting Carl Steadman's 99 Secrets to Twitter instead, randomly, roughly once a day: follow @to_no_one.

Thank you miss bunnyhead darling, for your act of care! Thank you Carl, for showing us what could be done and how we can be touched! I hope I don't offend anyone by re-performing the words.

The name I've used on Twitter is from the final secret:

99. i still love you, he said, to no one.

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INTERCONNECTED

{ 02.14 } My new theory is that I've lost some strength in my glutes and outer thighs, and that's letting my legs twist inwards, which means my knee isn't hinging on a clean line, which is why it's swollen now.

I've been putting stress under my shoulder blades for as long as I remember. A couple months back, the knot had compressed into a diamond that wouldn't shift, and every time I slept on a plane my two smallest fingers on my left hand would go numb. Clare traced these back first to my neck, then to my right shoulder where I'd lost a great deal of mobility some two years ago showing off in a pub arm wrestling. She fixed me and now my shoulders are level for the first time in all that time: when I stepped out of her house it felt like I was standing on a hill, I'd got that used to pulling one side of my body taut.

But during that two years I'd increased my fitness considerably, and lop-sidedly too it turns out. Levelling my shoulders means I'm now resolving that asymmetry all down my body in a cascade of little problems that bubble up every time I discover an imbalance. I twinged my neck for a week putting together furniture, and when I tilted left to nod at a coffee shop the pain made me put my head between my legs standing near the Angel, and I felt that kind of deep-down bone sick I've only felt before wading through a river of snow-melt so freezing to the ankles it visits your marrow.

Then this knee thing, which I brought on by running in the snow that morning. The sky was bruised and luminous, running through the flurries let me play at being a sentient super nebula charging through a galaxy of stars, and my feet - and the curbs - disappeared under the fresh white. But I should have warmed up more and taken it slower. I thought it was hamstrings and hip flexors that day: your knee is a floppy hinge held in balance by so many muscles, and if any is a little off the bend will grate and it'll swell, which is what's happened to me. One muscle at its limit already must have been finished off by the brittle morning. Stretching has helped.

But really this is the effect of no longer going to the gym and I never realised how much those squats were enabling my runs. Time to get those into the routine, build up my left leg again and get that knee problem sorted, and chase this asymmetry right out the soles of my feet; let it go to ground like a static charge.

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{ 2008.12.31 } I completed reading 104 books in 2008 (I also completed 104 in 2007). There are individual monthly lists: January; February; March; April; May; June; July; August; September; October; November; and December.

Those lists have links too. Here I just want to pull out my favourites. I made it a rule to recommend one book a month--I've highlighted those in bold, and put together those 12 make an incredible package.

Some common themes: last man on earth and journeys; stories that emerge only through the motion of the reader through the book; post-war history; alternatives to the cause and effect model; frontiers and open vistas; the big picture.

I'm not reading to a target next year. I don't have such a long commute any longer and I'd like to watch more films. I don't mind saying that a good deal of 2008 has been pretty eventful, and between that and some of the excellent books I've encountered, I'm slowly developing new ways of thinking and talking about myself, the world and how things happen in it. I'd like to take time to explore those ideas in 2009, and shape and fold them myself.

As a final curious constraint, I'm going to recommend three books from my 2008 reading, ones that I hadn't read before and now I think you definitely should if you haven't already (though really I would choose a different three from those highlighted 12 each time I picked): Impro, Keith Johnstone; Annals of the Former World, John McPhee; On the Road, Jack Kerouac.

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Books read December 2008, with date finished:

I've also read a few sci-fi novellas using Stanza on my phone (One-Shot, James Blish; Invaders from the Infinite, John Campbell; The Colors of Space, Marion Zimmer Bradley) but for some reason, being texts and not books made out of paper, I don't feel they belong here. I am capricious with my list of books read.

I'm not feeling too wordy today, so let's keep it brief.

The Holocene: scale, the big picture like Annals of the Former World (read May this year), nature and culture as a single thing, the tortuous paths of cause and contingency, the planets and its natureculture and geological structures and histories as metaphor mines: the planet as self.

Hollings: a collage mixing facts and facts of fiction, a portrait of post-war America (it's my favourite period), the back-drop to cybernetics, flying saucers and suburbia.

A Humument: a text found in the pages of the novel A Human Document, each page a painting, a play between text where we are trained to silently ignore everything but the encoded information, and the visual surface where every position, colour, reference, juxtaposition, quality is important, and to ricochet between these two. Poetry.

You should read Welcome to Mars, def.

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